Martha “M. Diddy” Stewart Tells All

July 5, 2005

Sometimes, I don’t have to work too hard on these things.

In an upcoming interview with Vanity Fair magazine, Martha Stewart reportedly talks about her time in prison, her experience with house arrest and her plans for the future. She also says her prison nickname was “M. Diddy.”

The hideous M. Diddy compound

Stewart served five months in federal prison for lying about a stock sale, and is about to finish a further five months that she has spent under house arrest. What’s that like? “Hideous.” Yes, especially when you are forced to spend it in only one of the several large houses on your 153-acre estate.

As are other felons under house arrest, Stewart is required to wear a monitoring device on her ankle, but she told Vanity Fair that she knows how to take it off. “It’s on the Internet. I looked it up,” she said. (Her publicist’s eyes reportedly “widened with alarm” at this revelation.)

Stewart tells the magazine that she has two TV shows coming up this fall, the inevitable talk show and her version of “The Apprentice.” She says that she will be much nicer than Donald Trump, though, and doesn’t want to be portrayed as “mean and harsh.” For example, instead of bluntly saying “You’re fired,” Stewart is “trying to come up with other ways to say it. For instance, if someone is from Idaho, I could say, ‘You’re back in Boise for apple-picking time.'” Somehow, that seems a whole lot meaner.

Stewart sort of apologized for things, in the way that people do when they are not really sorry. In her mind, apparently, the fact that she is appealing is evidence that she is in the right. “You can’t be sorry for something that—let’s see, how can I say this? I’m on appeal. You don’t appeal if you think that you should be sorry,” she said. Actually, M. Diddy, lots of people do that. Sometimes they do it because they have a public image to uphold, sometimes not. If it were up to me, she’d be back in Bedford before the cookie timer dings.